Why real estate professionals need a mobile solution

Real estate salespeople are in an ultra-competitive marketplace that creates a challenge to constantly survey the horizon for new opportunities to gain a leg up. Sometimes this may mean getting the first, inside scoop on a new property hitting the market; other times, it is the perfect advertisement placing. In today’s increasingly mobile and digitalized world, this advantage is a mobile app solution.

Businesses across all different industries and markets are turning to mobile development as a means to enhance their brands and improve the customer experiences that they offer. With the rise of mobile app makers, sales reps looking to learn how to build an app can have one built without the need of a developer. Additionally, mobile apps can provide other valuable tools like a loan calculator, notifications to urge buyers through the process and more.

Here are five reasons why salespeople should begin adopting a mobile solution as part of their key business dimensions today.

1. Faults with big real estate apps

A lot of salespeople shy away from developing their own mobile app because they feel that there is too much heavy competition from big real estate apps like Realtor.ca, Zoocasa and others. Instead, they opt to ensure that their listings make it on to these larger apps and piggyback off of their large user pools. But, those big schools of potential homebuyers are both an advantage and a disadvantage. After all, it is much harder for your listings to stand out when they are crowded by every other area listing.

Many of these big real estate apps aren’t as terrific as their download rates suggest. They attract lots of downloads because there aren’t many alternatives. In reality, many of these apps pad their search results with outdated listings. Nothing frustrates a homebuyer more than falling in love with a listing, only to find out it was sold weeks ago. The low reviews of these apps reflect these negative sentiments.

By offering a smaller, more intimate mobile app experience that is void of all the noise and old listing information, a sales rep has a significant opportunity to gain a massive edge in the marketplace.

2. Attract the younger, first-time homebuyers

Older millennials, who grew up with the Internet and are extremely adept at navigating their mobile devices, are beginning to reach the point in age and maturity that buying a home is a real, logical next-step. These potential home buyers are much less likely to call or visit a real estate office in person. Instead, they’ll opt to use their mobile device to browse online listings. They’ll do hours of research on their own, long before they contact or meet a real estate professional face-to-face.

Millennials are not only the future of the real estate market, but they are also some of the most skeptical and hard-to-convince shoppers. The brands that they decide to commit their loyalty to are those that exhibit a dedication to delivering the best possible experience. These attitudes and behaviours will also impact how and whom they pick as their real estate salesperson. What better way to attract their business and showcase customer value than to offer a unique mobile experience for them to use during their hunt for a future home?

3. Push notifications nudge the user through the home buying process

Buying a home is, by no means, an easy or quick process. It is a big decision that takes weeks, months and sometimes even years to finally reach. Additionally, a lot of steps and obstacles have to be overcome to go from only looking at houses, to making an offer and ultimately closing the deal. The complexity and gravity of a home buying decision can easily scare a potential homebuyer into a state of inactivity.

Push notifications are a non-intrusive way to help encourage shoppers to stay active and avoid being bogged down in these various steps. They can also notify house hunters when sellers drop their asking price.

Homebuyers can become disenchanted after losing out on the home of their dreams. It is a hard feeling to swallow and can put a serious damper on anyone’s house hunt. This makes a salesperson’s job particularly challenging, as they have to find a home that equals or tops this supposed dream home. Push notifications create an easy avenue for a salesperson to suggest related homes of the same style, in the same neighbourhood, same square footage and so on. Push notifications keep homebuyers in the game for longer.

One of the most valuable tools to include in a mobile app is a loan calculator. The majority of homebuyers have to rely on loans to afford a part of the cost of their new home. This affects how much their monthly mortgage price will be, how much they have to pay out-of-pocket, what price range they can afford and more. Loan calculators allow a potential homebuyer to input their own information and receive an accurate estimate of how much they’ll need to pay at closing and each month after.

Loan calculators promise high conversion rates because they quickly allow a user to decide, for themselves, whether or not a purchasing decision makes sense. Furthermore, they can investigate what needs to change, within their financial situation, to get the house of their dreams. Many real estate organizations offer a loan calculator on their website, but few of them encapsulate this valuable tool in a mobile environment, which presents another area of opportunity for a sales rep to gain an advantage over their competition.

Data is an invaluable resource for many businesses. As any good sales rep knows, staying on the inside track of housing trends is critical; a sales rep wants to know what customers are looking for before they ever say so. This also allows professionals to know what features of a property to highlight first in a listing, as well as knowing what a property is worth, even when the owners do not. In other words, the more a sales rep can learn and understand about his clients, the more successful they will be at moving properties and generating revenue.

Mobile apps are a wealth of data. A shrewd, crafty salesperson can examine the data of their mobile app to see what house features or styles are being searched for the most, how long a user looks at an individual property, at which point in the listing and when they click away. All of this data can be used to improve a salesperson’s ability to write effective, high-selling property listings, connect buyers to the right homes and get more money from the homes they sell (and thereby more revenue for their business).

In the Digital Age, a company’s capacity to access and leverage their data and data-born insights are going to be a big competitive differentiation; the real estate market is no different.

Andrew Gazdecki is the founder and CEO of Bizness Apps – making mobile apps affordable and simple for small businesses. “We’re a do-it-yourself iPhone, iPad, Android & HTML5 app platform that allows any small business to simultaneously create, edit, and manage mobile apps without any programming knowledge needed. Think of us as WordPress for mobile app creation. Many of our customers are mobile app resellers – marketing or design agencies that use our platform to cost effectively build mobile apps for small business clients.”